Biography
Bianca Raffaella (b 1992, London)
Working from memory and sensory cues rather than direct observation, Bianca Raffaella is a British artist and activist currently based in Margate. As a partially sighted artist, her ephemeral floral and figurative paintings draw viewers into her world by capturing fleeting moments suspended in "persistent vision," where her sight is in constant motion, and images appear only briefly as faint shadows or flickers of light. Raffaella's ongoing series of textural flower paintings evoke the artist’s experience of beauty in braille, which was how she first learned to read and write.
Raffaella relies on touch in her painting process. Never losing contact with the canvas, she blends delicate hues of blue, beige, and dusty pink until they become an ethereal impression, cloudy details made with fingertips, brushstrokes or scrapes of a palette knife.
Graduating with a First-Class Honours degree in 2016, Bianca Raffaella was the first registered blind student to graduate from Kingston University with a degree in the Visual Arts. Since completing her 2023/4 residency at the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR), Raffaella now works from TKE Studios, where she uses gestural fragments and impasto techniques to capture motion and visual shifts on the canvas. In 2021, Raffaella’s work was selected for the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition, coordinated by Yinka Shonibare, followed by her solo exhibition, Hushed Impressions, at Orleans House Gallery in 2023. She was also awarded the NatWest Entrepreneurship Funding Prize in 2019 for her bespoke sensory fashion label.
An advocate for accessibility in the arts, Raffaella has shared her insights as a speaker at the Goethe Institut’s Beyond Seeing project and as a panellist at Tate Modern’s Please Touch the Art talk. Most recently, she was selected by Dame Tracey Emin for Flowers Gallery’s 2024 Artist of the Day series, presenting a one day solo exhibition as part of the programme’s 25th edition.
